Backpacking China — 5 weeks of Tan Suo

Actually China wasn’t even on the list. But the adventurous son upon graduation from OU, decided to pursue his fledgling Mandarin. In China. So when the opportunity arose for him to take a month off from school and my schedule became such that a month was possible as well for me, we began to plan. Bigger backpacks were purchased. Squatter toilet techniques were reviewed. Immunizations. Visa. Maps, maps, and more maps. We nixed all the big cities. If I’m going to see something, I want to SEE something.

Something is not the interior of a city hotel where everyone speaks English and really, you could close your eyes and sense you were in any city of the U.S. No. What’s the point? I’m still young enough (recall the ad nauseum part? the women in my family have all been teenage mothers, including myself) to want to experience the places I go. That means hiking as opposed to a tour van, being exposed to uncomfortable physical conditions and intermingling with the population. I figure I can go back someday when I’m too old for REAL exploration and see Beijing, Shanghai, HongKong. And when I get really, really, really old, I’ll shop. Until then, exploration means occasionally being dirty, tired, and hungry, and some amazing captures on “film”.

The Wild West of China

This ain’t Beijing. It’s on the opposite side of the country, as far away as you can get from the major Chinese travel destinations. And if you managed to get here (a feat my friend), without knowing where you were headed you wouldn’t recognize it, or anyone living here, as being associated with China.

Machine guns and outdated airport equipment were in our face as we timidly looked around the tiny Kashgar (Kashi) airport in XinJiang Province. Not far from Afghanistan or Pakistan, the security was tight. In the Urumqui airport they’d flagged my backpack and after removing every single item comprising its 50+ lbs., determined the X-ray machine had not liked the looks of my water filter. The carbon filter looked menacing I suppose. Got to keep the water filter, but not before lots of time was lost trying to explain what a water filter is. My son’s fluency in Mandarin was not completely useless, just almost (they speak Uigher here). I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye for fear Urumqi had called ahead regarding the water filter incident. They hadn’t.

We embarked from the airport into a land that time has forgotten. Kashgar is a time warp that could just as easily have been the set of a Star Trek or Twilight Zone. It was indeed just as exciting as stepping through that portal opening. The Han Chinese are minorities here. Uigher is the language. The people (Uighers, Tajiks, Krygyzs, and Uzbeks) seemed the happiest and were indisputably the kindest we encountered during 5 weeks touring the backcountry of China.

The West of China, specifically the provinces of XinJiang and Gansu, had beckoned to me when my son and I planned the month long backpacking excursion, just as the Western United States has always enticed me. There are many similarities in their appeal. Still considered a no-man’s land (and marked so on a few maps), Kashgar is a fixture in time on the 6,000 year old Silk Road. In the XinJiang Province, 8 nations border to create a collision of people/culture/language, giving XinJiang’s capital, Urumqui, the title “most land-locked city in the world.”

Located in the Taklamaken desert, homes of mud and grass have stood for centuries. Sand storms are frequent. Coming from Beijing, or any of the larger cities, you see what you think is the same smog choking the air. But if you’re so lucky to find a shower, you realize once the water hits you, it’s not smog, rather sand. And regardless how new something might be in XinJiang, the sand ages everything quickly. Including humans.